<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>The Fall of Valour in the Soul by longwhitecoats</title>
<style type="text/css">

body { background-color: #ffffff; }
.CI {
text-align:center;
margin-top:0px;
margin-bottom:0px;
padding:0px;
}
.center   {text-align: center;}
.cover    {text-align: center;}
.full     {width: 100%; }
.quarter  {width: 25%; }
.smcap    {font-variant: small-caps;}
.u        {text-decoration: underline;}
.bold     {font-weight: bold;}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/28307394">The Fall of Valour in the Soul</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/longwhitecoats/pseuds/longwhitecoats'>longwhitecoats</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Moby Dick - Herman Melville</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Crueltide, Gen, Horror, Other, Whalefall, Yuletide Treat</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-12-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-12-25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-18 02:14:25</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>1,083</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/28307394</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/longwhitecoats/pseuds/longwhitecoats</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Ahab's death, and what happened afterward.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>23</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>Yuletide 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>The Fall of Valour in the Soul</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><ul class="associations">
      <li>For <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/kutsushita/gifts">kutsushita</a>.</li>



    </ul><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Thanks so much to Toft for the beta. I hope you enjoy this treat - I loved your whalefall prompt!</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Down they plunged, tethered by the line of Ahab’s own harpoon. The white whale was streaked red now, even in the darkness of the water; hot gouts of blood billowed past Ahab as his fingers clawed vainly at the rope, but only the creature’s death would satisfy him. Stars appeared before his eyes, from lack of air or by some trick of the water’s reflection at this depth he did not know, and a vicious chill closed around him. Desperately he scraped at the rope, cursing its maker, but the diving power of the whale exerted a force even his rage could not overcome. He began to feel the awful burn in his lungs that presaged death.</p><p>Then, just as suddenly as the line had taken him, it slackened. Ahab struggled free, suspended in a void, and looked upward for the sun. With his face turned toward the surface, he did not see the cause of the slackened line: the jaws of hell set in a white face, rising from the deep to swallow him. With a single bite, he was taken whole.</p><p>Then the whale plunged in earnest.</p><p>Ahab gasped, his chest filled half with water, half the putrid vapors of the whale’s own mighty lungs. He railed at his captor with bile and fever; he cursed the harpoon line that had doomed him; he cried for Starbuck; and finally he cursed the name of Jonah and even the name of God. He reached up to touch his ears, for he could no longer hear his own voice, and found them bloody.</p><p>His stinking, oily submarine shook and gyrated as it hurtled into the icy depths, and Ahab understood that he now felt from inside what he had so often seen from above – the violent roll of a whale attempting to dislodge a harpoon or a predator. He could feel the whale’s terror and rage, its own struggle. The whale’s blood had been raised through the ocean like a flag, and an enemy vaster and more powerful than even the white whale had seized it. For an endless moment they contended, the whale’s jaws letting in vast shocks of water as it gnawed, and Ahab glimpsed one long tentacle as big as the mast of the Pequod. Then the water in Ahab’s fleshy prison turned red, and the whale’s bone-vaulted chambers rang with its death cry in waves so massive they stopped Ahab’s own heart.</p><p>*</p><p>There are lands on the floor of the ocean that have never been touched by light. Even the constellations of zooplankton that cloud the mesopelagic zone diminish along with the sun and give way to utter blackness. The bioluminescent fish that brave the waters of eternal night, in life too deep below the surface for a diving whale to reach, inhabit a stratum of the sea still shallower than its floor. In most stretches of that body of water so incongruously named the Pacific, this depth is not much more than half a league, a distance that a sailor aboard ship might travel almost without a thought, but deadly and harrowing to that same man when measured from the keel of his ship downward.</p><p>But Ahab, in his mad pursuit of the whale, had laid his course over no ordinary seas. East from Japan he sailed with all the fury of a storm, so bent on battle that he paid no mind to the slow war that raged beneath. For it is here, past a scattering of islands that might have given the Pequod its last safe harbor, that a rift of fire opens like a maw, and the very earth is dragged, inexorably, to hell. And it was there, in midnight waters colder than Kokytos, that Ahab and his nemesis came to rest.</p><p>At first, there was solitude. But within only a few hours, the dinner guests began to present themselves: hybrid creatures with crab-like appendages, sea beetles, worms, and icy cousins to squid and octopi. There they feasted, for the fall of a whale is a mass of greater holiness to the creatures of this aqueous desert than any celebration of the most devout disciple in the lands above. First they chewed the precious flesh; then they sucked away the fat and brains; and as hours wore into days and months, smaller and more tenacious visitors chewed even the fat in the whale’s denuded bones. Nothing in the sea is wasted.</p><p>Ahab looked without eyes on this scene, imagining himself to be dreaming. Despite the utter darkness, he could see his skeleton laid out before him, almost as if he had grown the appendages that allowed the denizens of this midnight world to perceive it. His own body had been far more swiftly consumed than the whale’s, barely enough to make a single dish at a banquet of this size; and lacking a body, he had no arms to propel him upwards to the realms of light, nor lungs to take in the pure, sweet air he dreamed of finding there. Here he remained, bound eternally to his enemy even in death, unable to break their bond even at the utmost extremity of his rage and desperation. Perhaps it was that very rage which bound him there; perhaps some malevolent power of the whale’s dying curse had seized upon him. Whatever the cause, he could not break a chain that he could neither see nor touch.</p><p>Years stretched out, barer than the ocean floor. Ahab, who had spent his life crowded together with noisy, stinking men on a vessel not larger than the New Bedford customs house, had never known an emptiness like this. No smells of human food, not even the most weevil-bored lump of bread, met his nose; no creak of wood or growls of argument sounded; most alien of all, no rhythm of oars beating at the waves kept time for him or told him that he lived. It was intolerable, insufferable, a worse torture of the soul than any he had imagined visiting upon even that most hated creature whose corpse imprisoned him.</p><p>And here we must leave him, having obtained the object of his heart – his enemy’s destruction – at a cost greater than that paid by the first Betrayer himself. It may be that he remains there still, if his rage has not diminished; and some sailors tell stories, as they sail that stretch of depthless water, of a voice carried on the waves, wailing, crying for a final vengeance.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Notes to the reader: </p><p>• The creatures I included in the whalefall actually couldn’t survive at the bottom of the Marianas Trench, where I placed Ahab, but I took a little poetic license.<br/>• Kokytos is the frozen lake at the center of hell, where Dante located Judas Iscariot and Satan in his Inferno.<br/>• The Smithsonian has <a href="https://ocean.si.edu/ecosystems/deep-sea/deep-sea">a good article on whalefalls, if you’re curious.</a><br/>• And <a href="https://neal.fun/deep-sea/">this virtual ocean dive is both informative and delightful.</a><br/>• Lastly, the titular quotation from Moby Dick actually refers to Starbuck, but I couldn’t resist.</p></blockquote></div></div>
</body>
</html>